PLAGUE LAND

From the Remade series, volume 1

Age Range: 13 - 16

A New Jersey teen transplanted to
London survives a devastating new pandemic—but almost nobody else does.

Leon’s misery in his new British
school seems like the absolute worst, until the dying begins. The plague
starts as merely a series of nightmarish and unconnected deaths, but the
disease spreads almost faster than rumor. Moments after infection, the victims
begin hemorrhaging, and within hours they’ve been reduced to a bloody soup.
Vignettes from alternate points of view show the advancing disaster, but to
Leon, it’s merely a fearful suspicion based on odd news stories. The conspiracy
boards are alight: is this plague engineered by the CIA, North Korea, Mossad,
Russia, aliens, or the Islamic State? With his mother and younger sister, Leon
flees the city, but there’s nowhere safe from the illness that’s about to
destroy all animal life on Earth. Cinematically gory imagery of melted bodies
and twitching viscera punctuate Leon’s months of survival as one of the last
remaining humans. Leon is racially undescribed but seemingly white; the uneven
representations of race, class, and culture rely on stale tropes. It’s not
clear if the sequel will be able achieve the gross-out levels of this opener,
since there’s not many humans left to liquefy.